A Quote by Thom Powers
You can start a documentary with just a camera, as opposed to a fiction film where you need actors, a crew, a script, a lot more start-up resources. It may be self-perpetuating.
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With documentary, you just pick up a camera and start.
With fiction, you are creating an imaginary world. And it can be a very mechanical process. In a fictional film, you create the characters who become "real people" when facing the camera. When you stop shooting, they change their costumes and become someone else. And people tend to believe in documentary more than fiction. Even if the fiction is based on a true story, everybody will say, "Oh, they're only actors."
We exaggerate the difference between documentary and fiction. I think that on some level a fiction film is also a documentary on the actors. You can't wash away your life's history, which is written on your face, unless you get a facelift.
A lot of the time with an independent production, you go onto the set, and you rehearse it in front of the crew, and at that point, the cinematographer takes over. You start accommodating the camera instead of the camera accommodating you.
It's difficult to make movies. For me it was easier, as a refugee in Switzerland, to make documentary films, because I didn't need a lot of money for it. The way I tell my story or my opinion would be very similar in both fiction and documentary forms. But I found I could speak more effectively to convey this brutal reality through documentary than I could through fiction.
Usually the script is much more funny than the film turns out to be, in my case. The script is almost like a comic book but when you start making it, for some reason the film gets very serious.
With a franchise movie, it's got to turn the wheels of the industry, and the studio has to have them. So you start with a release date. They say we're going to make a new 'Bourne' film, and it comes out summer of X. Then they start on a script, and invariably, the script is not ready in time.
2021 is a fresh start for all of us. Production houses, actors, directors, the crew are strictly following shoot guidelines so we can finish our pending shoots and start new projects.
When you try to be true to the script, changes occur. A script is there to show us a certain direction. But when you actually have the actors in and you start shooting the movie, you have the actor say a line and it doesn't sound right so you change it and make it different. It's the script that gives birth to these changes and the more you try to stay true to the script, the more that happens.
A lot of actors just do whatever they do, and wherever the camera is, it is. They don't pay much attention, but I always did. I was always very close to the camera crew. They were my best buddies, no matter what movie or show I was doing.
When there's film rolling through the camera, there's a heightened awareness of the importance of that moment, from the actors and the crew. It creates a much more old-school respectful atmosphere for the process.
When you start to automate, you start to do the self-driving thing, you make it much more efficient. When these cars go into self-driving, you start to become a robotics company.
I think you can do a lot with fiction, and in some cases you can say even more in fiction than you can in straight-up documentary journalism.
To go into more specifics regarding actors, whether they're from Korea or the U.S., all actors know if they are loved by the director. When they feel that love from the director, they respond by giving a great performance on camera. Also, everyone on set - the crew, the actors - they were aware of the film's message and its broad theme, so these big issues were never discussed on set.
As loud as fans were , they need to go home now and start soaking up a lot of tea, drinking a lot of tea for the next 36 hours, whatever the case may be, 'cause they need to be just as loud Thursday night.
We've turned film into such an industry that we pursue naturalism just by shaking the camera and cutting the film to ribbons to provoke a bogus sense of documentary. But we haven't done the homework. To push the depth that the Actor's Studio did or the Russian theatres did with their actors is to rehearse, to spend time, to dig, to excavate.
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